I spent several hours in ‘Shady Shopping District‘, today…

…this has to be the prettiest post-apocalyptic build in SL…

… and, by far, one of the most interesting shopping environments…

… some kind of weirdness has happened here, perhaps decades ago, leaving most buildings in ruin, and giant, frozen octopus tentacles coming out of the ground…

… whatever it was happened so long ago, the ruins are long over-run by vegetation. There are little golden motes sparkling in the air, I trusted my alien physiology to protect me from them if they were actually spores, but still found them pretty…

… all is glorious decay…

… my only gripe about the place is the scream-inducing lag which, at it’s worst, was as bad as the, for me, benchmark horror sim lag at ‘Tralala’s Diner‘. It was this lag that was the cause of me staying here for more than three hours, just turning around could result in me getting hopelessly lost, so I had to do things over and over till I got where I wanted to be, and any impatience resulted in catastrophe. Most photos are not the ones I was looking at when I clicked the shutter, but the ones I got seconds later, when the sim reality caught up with my intentions…

… still, it’s a gorgeous sim, and there are several wonderful stores to be discovered if you have the fortitude to battle the lag.

As is my wont, when all the SL destinations become dully the same, and I want to go somewhere that isn’t a music club/enchanted forest/relaxing beach, I open my saved landmarks and start running through places I’ve been over the years, deleting the no longer extant ones…

… I always find somewhere fabulous I’d forgotten about…

… this time I found ‘Alpha.tribe‘, somewhere I visited so long ago, I don’t even remember doing it…

… I found a gorgeously surreal dreamscape…

… with a stunning sky…

… and mysterious flying saucers. What more could a girl ask for?

I visited ‘Handwood Aquarium‘, last night…

… this is a gorgeously done public aquarium, beautifully detailed…

… at the risk of sounding trite, this is very much like a real world aquarium, only without the seediness that such places often have…

… this is a museum-quality experience, with wonderful displays, and the lighting is fabulous, very soothing…

… it’s a very relaxing place to wander around in, viewing the explosions of stunning aquatic colour, and the sudden dartings of schools of pretty fish…

… there’s a gift shop, with very affordable aquatic-themed art, and next to that I was pleasantly surprised to discover the entrance to a ‘nature walk’…

… which I found equally as delightful as the aquarium…

… a wonderful little micro-worlderness of flora and fauna.

I dreamed I was in ‘Black Kite‘, last night…

… or I think it was a dream…

… perhaps I was really there…

… it’s so hard to tell, with Black Kite, the whole place is so dream-like…

… it doesn’t really matter…

… whether you are actually there, or not, it’s still beautiful.

I visited ‘Elvion-Woodland Realm‘, today…

… this is a beautifully crafted world…

… with a softly washed-out sky, whose light makes everything feel as though you are in a Victorian-era romantic painting of an idyllic, bucolic paradise…

… there’s plenty of scenes to discover, here…

… from woodland to shore…

… you wander through the paintings in your mind.

I noticed, today, that ‘The Apartments‘ still exist…

… so I went and had another look. My experience this time was slightly different than the first time, 9 months ago. This time I couldn’t find the central lounge area I found last time, so the images are from some different locations…

… lot’s of lovely signage for backgrounds…

… rain constantly pouring down beyond the windows…

… the future beckoning.

I recently visited ‘Salen’s Gallery‘…

… the landing point is one of the most dramatic I’ve seen for a while, a gorgeous place to shoot pictures…

… as is the interior of the gallery…

… which has a wonderful, continuous light show…

… playing across most of the surfaces…

… there’s also some great art here, too.

I saw that Transylvania was celebrating turning 17, and that people were welcome to come and celebrate with them for a week that ends soon, so I thought I’d go and have a look…

… while what I saw was totally acceptable, given the theme, it wasn’t what I’d expected. I’d expected cheesy overkill, but this town of Medieval/Tudor/Victorian-style buildings looks amazing…

… such wonderful mood evocation…

… and I really liked the lighting…

… eventually I arrived here, and this was what I’d expected it all to look like, but this was not tacky at all. I’m not into the whole vampire/roleplay thing, or the medieval thing, so didn’t go any further, but I was very impressed with what I did see, and must have been here for at least an hour… just past the landing area there are some really good art galleries, too.

I visited the very beautiful ‘Runaway Moon‘, today…

… the place is a dazzle of colours and mist…

… with purples being very prominent, and adding to the feeling that you are experiencing something extra-normal here, a reality deeper than dreams, and richer…

… in fact, the whole place is very dream-like…

… so much so, you can sit and listen to a bed-time story, read by a raccoon…

… then find yourself sleepwalking beneath the purple moon…

… not ever wanting to wake…

… to stay a dreamer.

After my last post, I was delighted to receive an invitation, from one of the people responsible for creating that monolith, to visit ‘ASR Kessel‘…

… this is a gorgeous scifi build that the ‘ASR’ group are creating. The build isn’t finished, yet, but they hope to have it done by the 1st of December…

… there is plenty of organic landscaping, which adds just the right amount of softness…

… to what I’m calling the ‘Cyber-Brutalist/Gothic’ architecture…

… which is further softened by plenty of lovely neon and cyber-heraldry…

… I love the combination of 1920’s era type fonts with neon and the proportions of scale used, especially on the ASR Embassy, which would look totally at home in either ‘BladeRunner’ movie…

… there is already a functioning nightclub/event space here…

… there are even some rooms to rent, though I found the rental to be pretty steep, but if you are rich, this would be a cool place to live…

… on the main concourse is the ‘Mochalorian Cafe’…

… where you can take your coffee inside or out. I am going to call the fabulous decor in this cafe ‘Cyber 70’s’.

There is even a functioning movie theatre, here. I enjoyed my visit, and meeting several of the ASR team, who were all very friendly. Visitors are welcome.